Confessions of a Social-Justice Meme Maker
I made pretty pictures that helped keep people enraged and mobilized. Then I asked myself: ‘Why am I doing this?‘
Christina Buttons
· 10 min read
The End of War Poetry
Among literary forms, war poetry is unusual for having enjoyed a universally acknowledged and tightly defined golden age.
Simon Evans
· 9 min read
Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style Revisited
Hofstadter argued that McCarthyism was simply the latest iteration of a longstanding American tradition.
Michael J. Totten
· 9 min read
Direct Instruction Works. So Why Is It Controversial?
In 2016, I was sitting in the classroom of a Melbourne school as Dr. Kerry Hempenstall described the early stages of a reading program. He projected a series of letters on the screen. First, he displayed an “f.” “This is an ‘f’,” he said. Then he displayed an “f” written
Greg Ashman
· 7 min read
Weekly Roundup and an Interview with Michael Shellenberger
Dear Quilletters, I hope you've had a great week and aren't too affected by the wild behaviour of the stock market. As always, we've prepared a bevy of interesting reads for you this week, including an interview with gubernatorial candidate Michael Shellenberger about what
Zoe Booth
· 5 min read
The White House’s Specious Gender Manifesto
The White House is claiming that the debate about childhood gender medicine is settled—even as numerous international experts are coming forward to say it‘s not.
Bernard Lane
· 18 min read
The Hard Left and Populist Right Agree on All the Wrong Things
The ideas that unite the hard Left and the populist Right against the West itself are the same ones that make them both so excited about the culture wars.
Stephan Jensen
· 8 min read
Can California Change?—An Interview with Michael Shellenberger
In October 2021, environmentalist activist and author Michael Shellenberger published his bestselling book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities. He is now campaigning to be the next governor of California on an independent ticket and a platform that promises to address the crises he identified in that book—a homeless
Peter Clarke
· 10 min read
Art Is Not Therapy
Something is flattened when our understanding of art is asked to serve the logic of a medical diagnosis, which sees the messiness of the human condition as a malady to be cured.
Jasmine Hu-Hollingshead
· 11 min read
Canada’s Racial Balkanization
With their newfound fixation on race and bloodline, Canada’s WASP elites are channelling a mindset that I thought I’d left behind in the former Yugoslavia.
Lydia Perović
· 9 min read
We Need to Talk About Abortion
It’s not only conservatives who are changing the subject.
Dilan Esper
· 7 min read
Is Moral Expertise Possible?—A Roundtable
Is moral expertise really a thing—normatively, theoretically, or metaphysically? All three major Western schools of moral philosophy seem to think so, including virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism.
What Explains Women's Fascination With BDSM Fiction?
Every generation or so (i.e., roughly every 25 years) a woman (it’s always a woman) writes a book about kinky sex—and a very specific type of kinky sex.
Robert King
· 10 min read
When Disagreement Becomes Trauma
How does one deal with those who claim that debate itself represents an agony beyond human endurance?
Jonathan Kay
· 8 min read
Quillette Podcast #188: How Elon Musk Can Promote Free Speech—Without Turning Twitter Into One Big ‘Dumpster Fire’
Veteran technology expert Jim Rutt tells Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay about the hard lessons he’s learned over four decades of creating and implementing content-moderation standards on numerous social-media platforms. Image below: The GameB Home Rules and Norms on Jim Rutt’s GameB site, as cited in this week’